


By Blood or Iron

by hollow_echos



Category: Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:23:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollow_echos/pseuds/hollow_echos
Summary: Marsh and Kelsier were bound by blood at birth. Blood was a fine thing, they were brothers, but Kelsier earned Marsh's true loyalty much later in life, under a different set of circumstances.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zynnser](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zynnser/gifts).



Iron-willed, they called him. Their father saw in Kelsier the perfect heir to the family name.

Marsh had seen the contrast between a weak and strong willed individual enough to understand the implicit value in this trait. Their father had taken both Kelsier and Marsh on his monthly review of their labor force’s productivity where Marsh was able to recognize a broken-willed thing masquerading in the flesh of a man. It wore the face of a skaa who pleaded for mercy as he was being tied to a post to be whipped for failing his work quota. As if his pleas would make up for the lost productivity the man had cost their estate. 

The sons of noblemen were often afforded a certain leniency for their misdeeds. The damage wrought by a young man’s drunken night on the town was quietly forgotten as coin passed between hands. Most sons were coddled in this manner. 

But their father wasn’t most men, and he had a different set of expectations of his sons. Kelsier had taken one of their estate’s prized horses down to the beach to run in an illegal betting race. He might’ve gotten away with a slap on the wrist, except for the horse tripping over it’s own hooves and snapping a leg. 

The fancies of a young boy, still maturing into a man, could perhaps be forgiven. But this time Kelsier had cost their father good horse flesh, and for that, a price was owed. When their father had dragged Kelsier out to the same whipping post – tinged a permanent red with the blood of many who had stood in that same spot, Kelsier could have begged for that same mercy.

But he’d stood silently as their father tightened the leather cord around his wrists. He’d cried out but once as the lash snapped across his back with the first strike, perhaps out of shock for understanding firsthand the pain of this implement and the reason it made such a good threat to keep their skaa in line.

For each of the hits that followed, Kelsier hadn’t moved, hadn’t struggled against his bindings, hadn’t pleaded for mercy. And even though their father raged at the immaturity of Kelsier’s antics, there had been a softness as he’d untied Kelsier’s bindings after he flayed open his son’s back. Perhaps a quiet pride that his son had weathered the punishment without breaking.

His father saw value in this. It was the iron will of a someday-heir to the house who would stand ground when pressed. Kelsier was a man who wouldn’t cower when a more powerful figure put a boot down on his throat and threatened to press his weight down upon it. Kelsier was the one who’d stare upwards at that would-be master with a steely gaze, calculating the angles and the leverage he’d need to bring that cruel person to their knees.

In that iron will, their father saw a strength that would lead their house to glory someday. 

But maybe Marsh saw a different thing. He saw a dead horse on a beach, the price another being paid for his brother’s pursuit of some grand adventure. Perhaps Marsh saw something dangerous. 

~*~

There is iron in the blood. 

Most people didn’t know this fact. To most people, blood was a much simpler thing. Keep it out of sight and mind on the inside of the body and you were doing just fine. Spill too much of it out onto the soil and someone was probably ending up dead if they weren’t there already. 

Marsh doesn’t remember where he learned this particular piece of trivia. Maybe from one of the traveling scholars his father paid to lecture the boys on the topics in which all lordlings should be well versed.

Maybe he’d pulled that fact out of one of the many books he borrowed out of the family library. Kelsier may have mocked the time Marsh spent with his eyes glued to whatever scroll he’d picked off a shelf, might’ve mocked the way his skin was pale from too much time hidden away from sunlight, but Marsh knew differently.

There was power in knowledge. Yes, most noblemen concerned themselves with ploys for power – how to win a contract with the empire away from their rival house, how best to use some juicy piece of gossip as leverage or blackmail.

And yet Marsh could marvel at the technical specifications of some modern marvel of engineering that someone had put to paper and see the true beauty of the thing. Men would always squabble for power and fame, but these sorts of technical innovations would live on as a legacy more permanent than any won in the political schemings and machinations of a noble house. 

Wading into noble house politics was like taking a viper to bed. His father handled such matters as he would play a game of chess – examining the angles and costs of each possible maneuver, as if the people who would suffer for those schemings were pieces of inanimate stone instead of living breathing humans that would pay a price for those schemings.

Where Marsh shrunk away from the idea of stepping into that arena, his brother was better suited to the role. Kelsier could wander into the latest nobleman’s ball hours late with a pretty woman on his arm and weave his way amongst the small clusters of their peers. Kelsier would be their father’s eyes and ears, rapt attention focused on any information they could bend to their advantage.

Yes, there was iron in the blood. And supposedly the same blood ran in both Kelsier’s and his veins. The weight of family ties supposedly ran in the blood too – loyalty to their house and to one another above all else. 

So blood was iron. And iron’s strong. Blood and iron are the things that knit the world together – the foundation upon which a brother could rely on a brother, or a father on his sons. Loyalty to one’s family, to one’s blood, before all else.

But the political schemings of his family cost people their livelihoods, sometimes their lives. 

Iron is strong when fresh from the blacksmith’s fire. But given time, iron also rusts. And when Marsh saw the body of another skaa carted away after being worked to death for the wealth of his family, maybe part of that loyalty corroded in a similar fashion.

~*~

It was an ironclad promise Marsh made to himself. He would never become what their father was. He would never become what he saw his brother becoming. 

Never would the day come where he lost measure of what a man’s life was worth. Human life wasn’t a thing you could assign a numeric value and tally up in columns. It should never be “how hard do I have to drive these skaa to deliver the quota of product I owe to the ruler?”

And even if the ledgers never labeled it in such a manner, Marsh knew enough of books and figures to see this truth played out on those pages. 

~*~  
There was a pounding in his head; it came from his father, that hammering pulse. It was too loud, a pressure in his head, overwhelming enough that it threatened to bring him to his knees. Something was splitting his head open, but a more important matter demanded his attention. 

His father stood over the corpse of their mother. ‘Whore’ he called her, ‘lying traitor.’ And they, the sons he’d raised and known and loved, in a mere moment were turned to the disgraceful whelps of a farce their mother had committed. Their mere existence would forever bear testament to their father’s shame at having been duped by a whoring skaa who’d lured him to bed.

The only acceptable shames were the ones you buried deep enough to never see the light of day. Board that shame up inside your psyche to turn over in your hands and torture yourself for in the late hours as you lay awake at night, but never let it see the light of day where some rival house could use that fact to bring you to your knees. 

So their father had a problem, he also had decided upon a solution. Kill the only witnesses to his shame, and bury the bodies where no one would ever find them. 

Their mother was dead. They’d come back from sword practice to find this horror. Their father had turned to face them with rage in his glare, disgust, and perfectly apparent murderous intent. 

He’d spat enough curses at them to make out the gist of the story – the lie their mother had perpetuated, and the price she’d ultimately paid. Their father was unarmed as far as Marsh could see. There was the hammering pulse that emanated from the man’s direction, but the source of this Marsh couldn’t decipher.

From the purple handprints around their mother’s neck, it appeared their father had strangled her. 

In the moment of seeing this, the family heritage Marsh had spent his entire life up until that moment denying reared it’s ugly head. Their father had his hands, but Marsh had a sword on his hip. The blade was out and held in a white knuckled grip as he took a step forward toward his father. Let a life be paid for a life, if anyone deserved to die, if Marsh was to kill a person someday, there would be no more justifiable reason than this.

As Marsh went to advance on their father, a hand on his shoulder pulled him back. Kelsier met his gaze, shaking his head. Maybe words were spoken in that moment; maybe it was something he read in his brother’s expression the message he needed to hear.

Every life had a value. He wouldn’t avenge his mother in any meaningful way by taking a life, even of a person who could commit an atrocity such as this. Let him find another way to honor his mother’s legacy and fight to make a world where things like this – where a person, by virtue of their lineage or sheer chance of what roof they were born beneath, determine the value of their life.

~*~

So in the moment where Marsh could have killed his father and killed the part of himself that he valued most, Kelsier had instead pulled him away and they’d stolen off in the night.

There were many things that happened after that – differences in their core personalities that led them down different paths of revenge as they sought to fight against the regime and empire that stole their mother’s life. Their paths diverged even if their ultimate goal and desired destination, the ruin of an empire, was a shared dream.

Kelsier was well intentioned but reckless. They shared a common goal; they’d chosen widely different routes to get there. 

Even so, his brother had saved him. Had saved the part of Marsh that he valued above all else. Maybe blood alone shouldn’t be enough to bind two people together with an indiscriminate loyalty, but in that act Kelsier had earned that devotion from Marsh.

So even if the commonsense part of Marsh screamed in protest when his brother had come to him with his plan to overthrow the empire – telling him to run in the opposite direction lest he get caught in the shrapnel when allomancers started pushing and pulling metals about, his feet had carried him to the door of Kelsier’s den. 

Maybe this plan would end up with widespread devastation and lives lost and, but Kelsier had been there to help Marsh avoid that eventuality at the moment it mattered most. He should leave, every fiber of his being knew this plan would end in ruin. But by blood, or iron, or the sort of loyalty one earned by pulling him back from doing the thing he’d sworn he’d never do – Kelsier was his brother. Marsh owed it to the man to see him through the chaos that would come of this plot, in the hopes of seeing his brother through safely to the other side. 

He should run, Marsh knew this to his very core. Steeling his nerves, he raised his hand to the door and knocked. 

~*~


End file.
